Review: House at the End of the Street

PLOT:
When a mother and her daughter move into a new neighborhood, they find that there is a dark history for the house next door. The daughter meets a young man whose parents were murdered in the home by his crazy sister. Yet since this is a horror film, things soon begin to get creepy at the HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET. Never mind that, there is really nothing creepy about this horrible film.

REVIEW:
Letâs start with the good. Elisabeth Shue and Jennifer Lawrence are adorable. That is itâ¦

Other than that I canât think of a nice thing to say about the dreadfully bad HOUSE AT THE END OF THE STREET, or if youâd preferâ¦ HATES! This is a wildly appropriate hashtag for this flick as there is much to hate in this laboriously pathetic movie.

To really break this thing down as much as I would like, Iâd have to spoil a whole bunch of the nonsensical events portrayed in the film. However, I will say that considering HATES rips off every other good horror movie, you can probably figure out whatâs going on before the movie begins. There is just too much bad here. For starters, every character makes the absolute worst choices possible. Even for a horror film. Secondly, several key elements are introduced that could have led to something better (time on the clock being 3:04am for instance), yet for the most part these ideas are abandoned. The flashbacks to the murder are really silly and redundant. And did anybody actually do any research as to why you would use a baby monitor? Itâs not so the âbabyâ could hear you talking! This was just moronic.

Director Mark Tonderai was definitely going for the hip, quick cuts and the out of focus shots with a vengeance. Maybe he was just trying to make it interesting, yet it all comes off as simply frustratingly uneven. There is no tension. Even the âjump scaresâ are unlikely to frighten anybody over the age of twelve. What could have been a great opportunity to use some truly creepy and ominous forest locations fails to live up to even one of the lesser FRIDAY THE 13th sequels. Not that HATES looked cheap necessarily, itâs just that the attempts at visual flair were uninspired and dull. What few interesting shots happened felt like they must have been borrowed from something else.

The trailer for HATES is a rambling and uninteresting way to sell this flickâ¦ too bad it is right on. This is an unfocused and dim movie that is near tortuous to sit through. The dialogue is atrocious, including a scene early on where Elissa (Lawrence) blurts out to Ryan (Thieriot) something along the lines of, so youâre parents are dead and stuff. Not the exact line clearly, but it was equally as clumsy and wasteful. Sorry to say, you canât get much more wasteful than this flick which also seemed to run way too long. The worst part of it is itâs not even funny bad, just roll your eyes and hope it ends soon bad. See, good talent can still make bad films.